Don’t waste your Google Places listing

Okay, so it would be fair to say I am banging on a bit about Google places. The reason I’m doing this is because I see many new customers that have not claimed their listing mainly because they’re not sure how to.

I was with the customer a few weeks ago and together we spent an hour or so preparing the content doing a little bit of keyword research and ensuring we had the right descriptive information, as well as working out what we were going to put under additional details. We then spent another hour on Google completing a listing, we immediately got our pin verification by phone, and we were live on Google places just a few hours later.  VERY EXCITING!

Last week I got a phone call from the customer who is getting several click throughs from Google Places to his website each day but no enquiries. We had another look at his listing and there was very little wrong with it until we clicked on it and came to his website.

The excellent work we’d done finding the three main areas of its business for Google places was completely undone by the homepage of his website. On coming to the homepage there was no obvious route that matched the three primary business areas listed on Google places. This had the effect of confusing people when they got to the homepage and therefore losing them back to the search engines before we were able to convert them into genuine visitors. If you use Google analytics this is called a bounce.

The moral of this little story is simple, make sure that your hard work generating inbound links from Google places and any other lead sources isn’t wasted by a poorly designed landing page (in this case the home page). If you’ve ever done any sailing on cruisers you’ll probably be familiar with the expression “early and obvious” which relates to actions that you take in a sailboat when avoiding other craft. I apply the same logic to all webpages, you must ensure the visitor can see where they need to go the moment they come onto the page by making it almost painfully obvious. The goal of your homepage or landing page should be to get the customer to where they want to be as quickly and as easily as possible, and then get them to engage with a call to action.

I hope you found this useful in helping you apply some simple rules to both Google places and your landing page. If there’s anything I can do to help please get in touch.